Is your team greater than the sum of its parts?

We all know it when we see it. 

Someone who, when put into a group, consistently helps the team to outperform the sum of its parts. 

We’ve encountered these people in our personal life, at work, during our education, in sports- and whether we are talking about a great manager or a great left-winger, the outcome of their input is generally the same- they smooth over differences, quickly identify and leverage talent, and encourage sharing towards a common goal. 

But what exactly is it that makes those individuals stand out, and function with that special glow of what we are calling the team player effect?

Given that teams are the building blocks for society, wouldn't it be great if we could better identify those individuals that are more likely to help others rise to the top?

Rather than focussing on individual skill, shouldn't we also be looking for talent+, for the individual who not only has a great CV but knows how to leverage everyone else’s?

What would we be looking for? Certain personality traits, IQ, domain knowledge, or something different?

We recently started working with a world-class research and talent-identification organisation on this exact problem, and we wanted to share with you some of what we’ve found. It might surprise you!

A little bit of research

Understanding how individuals impact team performance is what Harvard Researchers Ben Weidmann and David Deming attempted to find out in their 2020 study "Team Players: How Social Skills Improve Team Performance", with interesting results. To do this, researchers ran group assessments focussed on certain problem-solving skills, which were strikingly similar in style to our games.

The paper found that team players- those who caused their team to exceed their predicted performance based on individual skill- score significantly higher on a well-established measure of social and emotional intelligence, but did not differ across a variety of other dimensions, including IQ, personality, education and gender.

They concluded that social skills – defined as a single latent factor that combines social intelligence scores with the team player effect – improve team performance about as much as IQ. Big5 personality traits such as extroversion, conscientiousness, etc, were less predictive of team outcomes than social skills.

What’s more, team player effect is about 60 percent as important as individual skills in explaining group performance. That number might not sound so exciting at first glance, but think about it: on a series of cognitive problem-solving tasks, the individual who isn’t so great at puzzles but is a brilliant team player can influence their team’s performance 60 percent as much as the Wordle genius.

In fact, there is a whole body of research supporting the labour market returns of social skills, as opposed to cognitive or domain skills, and it is something we can and should be measuring.

Ultimately, researchers concluded that the individual assessments used in nearly all educational and employment settings miss a lot of information about worker productivity.

To identify good team players, you must also measure performance in team settings.

Translating research to practice

Turning research into practice is not always straightforward, and the organisation that we're working with is selecting from a large, international pool of highly talented individuals. What’s more, the cultural background of these individuals couldn’t be more diverse.

We’ve designed a game methodology leveraging some of this research to help identify great team players, but with the added benefit of also being fun and accessible for the participants.

As well as tracking each team’s problem solving performance, we used an individual ranking system and a qualitative observation tool to determine those players who repeatedly contributed to high performing teams.

We‘re in the retro phase of the project, and already, the results are exciting: insights from our games and team player effect program will help our client to better understand which individuals make a consistent contribution to team performance.

If you're interested in finding out more about our program methodology and how we can also help you identify great team players, feel free to get in touch with us at: hello@loumee.co